This is the first installment of a series on the “Epistemology of Postmodernism.”

Let us begin with a brief overview of the series: In the first three installments we will survey two “Modern Precursors” to postmodernism - René Descartes and Immanuel Kant. We will briefly summarize and evaluate each figure.

In the next four installments we will survey three “Transitional Figures” to postmodernism - Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Likewise, we will briefly summarize and evaluate each of them.

After this, we will attempt to define the concepts that are crucial to postmodern epistemology, and we will interact with and critique them.

Let us now turn to our first section.

Modern Precursors to Postmodernity

As mentioned, we will initially treat some key modern figures before we survey a sample of some of the more significant transitional figures to postmodernism.

René Descartes (1595-1650)

René Descartes is often considered to be the father of modern philosophy. As such we would expect to find that the main features of his philosophy will be very much opposite to what we discern in postmodern thought.

This may suggest one of two things: one, that Descartes’ philosophy is exactly what postmodernism denies and that we will consequently find nothing of it in our discussion of postmodernism; or two, that his philosophy forms the constant background to postmodernism – it functions as a dialogue partner (a convenient foil if you will) of postmodern philosophers.

We will extract only a few seminal features from Descartes’ philosophy, which (consequently) set the stage for Kant and then the transitional figures that we will examine. These features of his philosophy that we will focus on are (1) foundationalism, (2) rationalism, (3) essentialism, and (4) representationalism.

(1) Foundationalism

Descartes in many ways embodies the antithesis to postmodern thinking. Here is a man totally isolating himself from the external world and from the community of fellow seekers. He is a man in search of a bedrock of epistemic certainty, and he carries out this search solely by the faculties of intuition and deduction.

Intuition, for him, means not some mystical experience of coming to feel something but rather a very unemotional immediate thought - a clear and immediate perception - an innate idea which has nothing to do with experience at all.

Deduction, for Descartes, is the method of inferring certain conclusions from facts one already knows (presumably indubitably). Both intuition and deduction, as the only and “most certain routes to knowledge,”¹ are believed to yield nothing but absolutely certain, objective knowledge.

“Here is foundationalism: the attempt to establish some absolutely certain starting point on which all knowledge could rest, and which would then have its truth guaranteed as well.”²

The need for this quest for a new authority of knowledge (or, perhaps more accurately, the elevation of the autonomy of reason) arises in the context of a repudiation of both (1) the Catholic dogmatism of his day (which he would have encountered in particular force as a student at a Jesuit school) and (2) the new skepticism which was quickly gaining prominence in early modern Europe.³

The rejection of all conventional authorities (i.e., authorities which dictate both the sources and the content of knowledge) leads then to the dawning of critical philosophy in general and Descartes’ foundationalist project in particular.

(2) Rationalism

Contrary to much postmodern thought (which greatly esteems public opinion or communities of knowledge) and also contrary to the empiricism of his own day, Descartes senses that knowledge can only be achieved by turning “the mind inward upon itself so that it could fasten upon some absolutely certain and self-evident truth.”⁴ In fact, he believes that the mathematical method is so generally and universally true (and applicable beyond mere mathematics) that it alone can lead to the knowledge of truth.

What he ultimately seeks is “a universal type of knowledge, both in the sense of what is true for everyone and of what is true of all areas of knowledge.”⁵

Descartes holds that philosophy proper must replace the medieval and Thomistic mixture of natural and revealed knowledge in natural theology. Specifically, reason is believed to be the most likely candidate to take command of this new knowledge experiment. In fact at the time, reason is considered to be universal⁴ and therefore adequate to serve as a new authority in epistemological matters⁶

According to this scheme, reason is charged with discovering the presupposed rational structure that inheres reality. After he applies methodological doubt to all bodies and propositions of conventional knowledge, Descartes finds the self as thinking subject (or, rather, as doubting subject) to be the absolute metaphysical and epistemological starting point (hence his famous “cogito ergo sum”). From the self as his epistemological starting point then, the “clear and distinct perceptions” or intuitions yield synthetic truths – truths about objective reality that are otherwise unattainable in an a priori fashion.

By way of deduction, Descartes’ rational argumentation “lead[s] from self to God, and from God to the physical world.”⁷
In Descartes’ rationalism, however, even the existence of God can (and in fact must be) rationally presupposed. Therefore, even Descartes’ autonomous reason is still a reason that operates within a theistic universe and is certainly not secular.⁸

There is, of course, a certain circularity that results from this fact. You see, Descartes needs the concept of God (“who is not a deceiver”⁹ as he says) to ensure that these “clear and distinct perceptions” or ideas are in fact true - and infallibly so. He then goes on to prove the existence of God by way of these perceptions or ideas which (being mere effects), cannot have a greater objective reality than their cause.¹⁰ With this move he comes to conclude that God exists - and necessarily so.

(3) Essentialism

Although Descartes clearly distinguishes between the res cogitans (i.e., the mental idea or representation of a “thing”) and the res extensa (i.e., the objective reality of a “thing”),¹¹ he never calls into question the objective existence of the latter. Rather, for him (as for many philosophers before him) the question is: how do mind and matter relate? In other words is it possible to know what is really “out there?”

His essentialism comes to bear vis-à-vis his proof of the existence of God and the physical world. Here, he postulates that the objective reality (of a cause) must be at least as great as the reality of the idea (the effect). Thus, in this kind of essentialism, both the existence of God and a certain number of His (essential) attributes arise by necessity (rather than, for example, from revelation).

This is the essentialism to which postmodern thinkers are so very much opposed. Despite this essentialist stance, however, Descartes posits a radical disjunction between mind and matter which, consequently, will lead to a decisive separation of the respective “sciences” (e.g., the sciences of the mind, such as theology, and the sciences of the body, such as physics).

This so-called “Cartesian compromise”¹² enables Descartes to remain committed both to the “new science” and to the Catholic faith and church. In due time, it leads to the influential and widespread conviction (which is developed further and on different grounds in Kant) that there can be no material conflict between science and theology since they occupy different domains and since each produces truth only within and about its respective sphere.

Even though Descartes’ “compromise” has not been very convincing to subsequent philosophers, one must say that his essentialism has, nevertheless and for a long time, been virtually taken for granted.

“All his immediate successors took it more or less for granted, at least as a starting point, that there is a material world and that there is a self that knows this world while remaining immune to its vicissitudes and to its mechanism.”¹³

This continues on basically until Kant, who challenges the Cartesian Ausgangspunkt (i.e., the mind) and he argues that it is unable to access an objective world “out there” that merely awaits discovery.

(4) Representationalism

A corollary of Descartes’ essentialism is his representationalism according to which one can become aware of external objects (res extensa) only by way of the mediation of the ideas¹⁴which represent them.

Accordingly, Descartes holds that there must be a plausible explanation for the orderliness by which we perceive material objects. The best explanation, therefore, is that the perceptions or ideas that we have (i.e., res cogitans) are caused by and represent the res extensa of the external world, a world which we therefore have good reason to believe actually exists.

This Cartesian representationalism gives ground for a rather specific kind of correspondence theory of truth because it ensures a true transaction or interaction from the res extensa to the res cogitans in that the one “represents” the other.

1. Williams Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, 2d ed., Vol. 3 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 157.↩
2. Millard Erickson, Truth or Consequences. The Promise & Perils of Postmodernism (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 56.↩
3. Particularly the so-called “new pyrrhonism” propounded by another Jesuit, Juan Maldonat, during Descartes lifetime.↩
4. Jones, History, 159.↩
5. Erickson, Truth, 54.↩
6. A thought, incidentally, which shows Descartes to be not altogether totally innovative in this regard since he is only borrowing the best insights of antecedent Greek philosophy (such as Plato, cf. Jones, History, 159; 161) which eventually (after the French and American revolution) constitutes the philosophical foundation for democratic politics.↩
7. Jones, History, 165.↩
8. Cf. ibid., 171.↩
9. Ibid., 173.↩
10. There is debate with regard to whether this circularity is broad or narrow, but we cannot occupy ourselves with this dispute in this brief historical overview.↩
11. Or, simply, the mind and matter.↩
12. Cf. Jones, History, 176.↩
13. Ibid., 189.↩
14. We are here speaking of the “adventitious ideas” in distinction from the “innate ideas” discussed earlier. ↩